Breaking the strangle hold on oil shale

Houston Chronicle:

Along the western slope of the Rocky Mountains lies a possible path toward energy independence.

The world's largest deposit of oil shale is hidden here, beneath a landscape dotted by pinyon pines and twisted junipers.

If the oil industry can learn how to extract oil and gas from the oil shale in a cost-effective manner, the United States could lay claim to oil reserves totaling, perhaps, 800 billion barrels — three times Saudi Arabia's.

With oil prices riding high and conventional crude reserves ever more difficult to find and produce, companies including Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Schlumberger are conducting research on a resource that could forever alter the geopolitics of energy.

But the history of oil shale has been a story of grand plans and locked gates.

And its future is anything but certain. At best production is years away, while upredictable oil markets, growing water demand, sizable electricity needs and climate change all pose potentially huge hurdles.

"We're working on the tough stuff," concedes Rick Mykitta, operations manager for Shell Oil Co.'s Mahogany oil shale research project.

President Bush last month linked oil shale with his oft-repeated calls to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and more areas offshore to oil and gas drilling, hailing the "extraordinary potential of oil shale."

But Democrats have barred the Bureau of Land Management from leasing any federal land forcommercial-scale oil shale projects.

And whether a nation now focused on boosting use of renewables and lowering dependence on fossil fuels will give oil shale another look remains an open question.

...

Salazar, in an interview, said he supports looking at oil shale as a possible energy source for the nation. "I just want to do it in the right way." But he contends issues like water needs and other environmental impacts must be understood before leasing acreage for full-scale commercial operations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to look beyond oil and gas. "Do we really want to add that much more fossil burning to the planet?" asks Steve Smith of The Wilderness Society.

There is much more.

The story has a good deal of info on the technical problems, but I thought the political problems it exposed were the most revealing because they expose why Democrats are content to burn high priced foreign oil instead of lower cost domestic supplies. The fact is that the Democrats believe that if they can drive up the cost of oil by strangling supply they can then force people to accept a lower standard of living by using higher cost "renewables."

The Salazar statement is also revealing in the way Democrats try to cover up their strangling of the energy supply by pretending that they are looking for a smarter and better way, but the fact is they are not smarter or better. They are the opposite of smart. They are forcing us to spend twice as much buying from people who do not have our interest at heart putting the same amount of fossil fuels to work. In short, their plan is nuts.